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Category: Buddhism

Realizing the Matrix—On the Possibility and Desirability of “Uploading” Insight

Realizing the Matrix—On the Possibility and Desirability of “Uploading” Insight

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There is a special class of knowledge or wisdom that we might call insight or realization. This comes in a variety of forms and degrees. For example, someone tells you how scary it is to be in the water when someone spots a shark. You’ve been afraid before, you’ve been in the ocean before, so you think you have a pretty good idea of what that must be like. But you don’t really realize what it’s like until you’ve been…

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Nihilism, Hell, and Self-Interest

Nihilism, Hell, and Self-Interest

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Often when people fear hell, they fear it in the sense of an afterlife of eternal torment, or, perhaps more sophisticatedly, eternal separation from God. As others have noted, though, hell exists on earth in a variety of forms. For example, you can read Sartre’s “No Exit” as making the case that “hell is other people.” As an introvert, I find that line of thinking attractive, but I think a more pressing form of hell on earth is putting one’s…

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The Wisdom of Pain

The Wisdom of Pain

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“…if I say again that the greatest human good is daily to converse about virtue [value/meaning], and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living – that you are still less likely to believe.” —Socrates in Plato’s Apology Others have written on this essay’s topic, likely better than I. And since my background is largely academic, I feel a pressing urge to research what they’ve said,…

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“You cannot petition Kannon with Prayer!”—Calling upon Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara through Embodied Compassion

“You cannot petition Kannon with Prayer!”—Calling upon Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara through Embodied Compassion

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In Mahayana Buddhism, enacting the life of the Bodhisattva is the goal of every practitioner. The Bodhisattva is one whose compassion for others’ suffering is so great that she delays her final escape from samsara (the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, life to life, and which is characterized by suffering and dissatisfaction) until she has helped to awaken all other sentient beings, freeing them from suffering and samsara. There are two basic varieties of Bodhisattvas. The first are the…

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Single-pointed Activity: When eating eat; when walking walk.

Single-pointed Activity: When eating eat; when walking walk.

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Satori (enlightenment?) on the cushion in all of its ineffability is said to be single-pointed; a dissolution of the self and all selves. But such dissolution could not be the way of lived enlightenment practice off the cushion. For otherwise in your attempt to be compassionate activity in the world, you would be no better off than the perverse skeptic who refuses to avoid the pitfall because he’s convinced his senses cannot be trusted. Nevertheless, off the cushion, there is…

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Cutting Off the Finger Pointing to the Moon: A Commentary on Dōgen’s, “…when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark.”

Cutting Off the Finger Pointing to the Moon: A Commentary on Dōgen’s, “…when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark.”

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In Dōgen’s “Genjō-Kōan” fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō, he writes: When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you intuit dharmas intimately. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. I would venture to say that part of the value of Dōgen’s writing, like that of many good poems and prose, is that it is open to multiple readings…

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Something about the self

Something about the self

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With some questions we just can’t help our- selves. Buddhists answer one way. Hindus answer another. Both say we’ve got the wrong idea of what the self is or isn’t. I’m not sure what to think…except… that they, that we, are likely all a bit off in our estimation. Is it a bit like when in the Boy Scouts, on a camping trip, the older scouts would make the younger scouts excited about snipe hunting? And so off we’d go…

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Compassion and the Epistemology of Suffering Thresholds

Compassion and the Epistemology of Suffering Thresholds

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In an attempt to get clearer, and less hyperbolic, about the value of suffering, I earlier suggested the idea of a suffering threshold, which is the “point” at which suffering loses its (positive) value and warrants easing. The idea of easing suffering leads directly to compassion/pity and this passage from section 338 of Nietzsche’s the Gay Science: The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in…

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Buddhism and Aristotle on the Appropriateness of Suffering Grief: A Further Mark Against Buddhism

Buddhism and Aristotle on the Appropriateness of Suffering Grief: A Further Mark Against Buddhism

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In the well-known parable of the arrow, the Buddha responds negatively to the usefulness of answering certain metaphysical questions. The point that he makes is that they are not important for furthering the goal of alleviating dukkha (suffering/existential dissatisfaction): Whether the view is held that the world is eternal or not, Malunkyaputta, there is still birth, old age, death, grief, suffering, sorrow and despair – and these can be destroyed in this life! I have not explained these other things…

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The Monkey Swinging in the Way of Greatness

The Monkey Swinging in the Way of Greatness

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After teaching about Buddhism this past week and Nietzsche’s ideas on creativity and greatness, and after watching Limitless last night, the following thoughts came to me. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: How does one become stronger?— By coming to decisions slowly; and by clinging tenaciously to what one has decided. Everything else follows. The sudden and the changeable: the two species of weakness. (Section 918) In Limitless, a creatively blocked writer takes a drug that allows him to utilize…

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